Deep Dive Into Key Passes

They call soccer “the beautiful game” for a reason- even if the score is one-nil. It’s a fluid sport, played by billions of people, anytime, anywhere. Even as recently as 15-20 years ago, teams only kept basic soccer statistics.

“It’s a game of constant movement, how could we track things other than goals, shots, and assists,” they would say.

Now, Krossover Soccer gives coaches an opportunity to take a deep dive into that 1-0 game, using advanced statistics to ensure that the next 1-0 game goes in their favor.

Today, we’ll break down one stat, in particular: the key pass.

What is a key pass?

In the simplest of terms, a key pass is a pass that leads to the recipient of the ball having a goal scoring opportunity, without actually putting the ball in the net.

Why is this statistic important?

We see players get rewarded for goals all the time, but those goal scoring opportunities don’t come out of thin air, do they? The key pass metric rewards those players who made that goal scoring chance likely.

So what do key passes look like? Let’s look at a few examples of Krossover users below:

None of these examples led to an actual goal, which is why they won’t show up on the stat sheet. But as a coach, the reason this stat is important is that it tracks who is actually being productive during their 90 minutes of work.

When breaking this game down even further, we found that the team in question had 12 key passes. Digging a little deeper, we found that No.5 and No. 12 made the majority of key passes (7/12), and they also happened to be in key positions in the formation. Here's how easy it is to filter out key passes using Krossover.

So as a coach, you could deduce that these athletes were doing their job, but their teammates weren’t converting. If some players did not play ninety minutes, you could divide the number of minutes by their key passes to see who was truly the most productive on that day.